On
page 224 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that
an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British
divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th
of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The
torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay,
an insignificant one, to be sure.

The following statement,
dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of
English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao, throws an unsuspected light
over the whole affair. The first two pages of the document are
missing.

". . . and I hung up the receiver. Immediately
afterwards, I recognized the voice that had answered in German. It
was that of Captain Richard Madden. Madden's presence in Viktor
Runeberg's apartment meant the end of our anxieties and-but this
seemed, or should have seemed, very secondary to me-also the end of
our lives. It meant that Runeberg had been arrested or murdered. [1]
Before the sun set on that day, I would encounter the same fate.
Madden was implacable. Or rather, he was obliged to be so. An
Irishman at the service of England, a man accused of laxity and
perhaps of treason, how could he fail to seize and be thankful for
such a miraculous opportunity: the discovery, capture, maybe even the
death of two agents of the German Reich? I went up to my room;
absurdly I locked the door and threw myself on my back on the narrow
iron cot. Through the window I saw the familiar roofs and the
cloud-shaded six o'clock sun. It seemed incredible to me that that
day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my
inexorable death. In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been
a child in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, was I-now-going to die?
Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely,
precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do
things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and
the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .
The almost intolerable recollection of Madden's horse-like face
banished these wanderings. In the midst of my hatred and terror (it
means nothing to me now to speak of terror, now that I have mocked
Richard Madden, now that my throat yearns for the noose) it occurred
to me that that tumultuous and doubtless happy warrior did not
suspect that I possessed the Secret. The name of the exact location
of the new British artillery park on the River Ancre. A bird streaked
across the gray sky and blindly I translated it into an airplane and
that air­plane into many (against the French sky) annihilating
the artillery station with vertical bombs. If only my mouth, before a
bullet shattered it, could cry out that secret name so it could be
heard in Germany ... My human voice was very weak. How might I make
it carry to the ear of the Chief? To the ear of that sick and hateful
man who knew nothing of Runeberg and me save that we were in
Staffordshire and who was waiting in vain for our report in his arid
office in Berlin, endlessly examining newspapers ... I said out loud:
I must flee. I sat up noiselessly, in a useless perfection of
silence, as if Madden were already lying in wait for me.
Something-perhaps the mere vain ostentation of proving my resources
were nil-made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I would
find. The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the
key ring with the incriminating useless keys to Runeberg's apartment,
the notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy immediately (and
which I did not destroy), a crown, two shillings and a few pence, the
red and blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet.
Absurdly, I took it in my hand and weighed it in order to inspire
courage within myself. Vaguely I thought that a pistol report can be
heard at a great distance. In ten minutes my plan was perfected. The
telephone book listed the name of the only person capable of
transmitting the message; he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a
half hour's train ride away.

I am a cowardly man. I say it
now, now that I have carried to its end a plan whose perilous nature
no one can deny. I know its execution was terrible. I didn't do it
for Germany, no. I care nothing for a barbarous country which imposed
upon me the abjection of being a spy. Besides, I know of a man from
England -a modest man-who for me is no less great than Goethe. I
talked with him for scarcely an hour, but during that hour he was
Goethe ... I did it because I sensed that the Chief somehow feared
people of my race-for the innumerable ancestors who merge within me.
I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.
Besides, I had to flee from Captain Madden. His hands and his voice
could call at my door at any moment. I dressed silently, bade
farewell to myself in the mirror, went downstairs, scrutinized the
peaceful street and went out. The station was not far from my home,
but I judged it wise to take a cab. -I argued that in this way I ran
less risk of being recognized; the fact is that in the deserted
street I felt myself visible and vulnerable, infinitely so. I
remember that I told the cab driver to stop a short distance before
the main entrance. I got out with voluntary, almost painful slowness;
I was going to the village of Ashgrove but I bought a ticket for a
more distant station. The train left within a very few minutes, at
eight-fifty. I hurried; the next one would leave at nine-thirty.
There was hardly a soul on the platform. I went through the coaches;
I remember a few farmers, a woman dressed in mourning, a young boy
who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and
happy soldier. The coaches jerked forward at last. A man whom I
recognized ran in vain to the end of the platform. It was Captain
Richard Madden. Shattered, trembling, I shrank into the far corner of
the seat, away from the dreaded window.

From this broken state
I passed into an almost abject felicity. I told myself that the duel
had already begun and that I had won the first encounter by
frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of fate,
the attack of my adversary. I argued that this slightest of victories
foreshadowed a total victory. I argued (no less fallaciously) that my
cowardly felicity proved that I was a man capable of carrying out the
adventure successfully. From this weakness I took strength that did
not abandon me. I foresee that man will resign himself each day to
more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors
and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious
undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it,
ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
Thus I proceeded as my eyes of a man already dead regis­tered the
elapsing of that day, which was perhaps the last, and the diffusion
of the night. The train ran gently along, amidst ash trees. It
stopped, almost in the middle of the fields. No one announced the
name of the station. "Ashgrove?" I asked a few lads on the
platform. "Ashgrove," they replied. I got off.

A
lamp enlightened the platform but the faces of the boys were in
shadow. One questioned me, "Are you going to Dr. Stephen
Albert's house?" Without waiting for my answer, an­other
said, "The house is a long way from here, but you won't get lost
if you take this road to the left and at every crossroads turn again
to your left." I tossed them a coin (my last), descended a few
stone steps and started down the solitary road. It went downhill,
slowly. It was of elemental earth; overhead the branches were
tangled; the low, full moon seemed to accom­pany me.

For
an instant, I thought that Richard Madden in some way had penetrated
my desperate plan. Very quickly, I understood that that was
impossible. The instructions to turn always to the left reminded me
that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point
of certain labyrinths. I have some understanding of labyrinths: not
for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts'ui Pen who was
governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write
a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to
construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen
years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a
stranger murdered him-and his novel was inco­herent and no one
found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost
maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a
mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I
imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and
returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I
thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading
labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some
way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my
destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of
time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living
countryside, the moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well
as the slope of the road which eliminated any possibility of
weariness. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended
and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost
syllabic music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind,
dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be an enemy
of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not
of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. Thus I
arrived before a tall, rusty gate. Between the iron bars I made out a
poplar grove and a pavilion. I understood suddenly two things, the
first trivial, the second almost unbelievable: the music came from
the pavilion, and the music was Chinese. For precisely that reason I
had openly accepted it without paying it any heed. I do not remember
whether there was a bell or whether I knocked with my hand. The
sparkling of the music continued.

From the rear of the house
within a lantern approached: a lantern that the trees sometimes
striped and sometimes eclipsed, a paper lantern that had the form of
a drum and the color of the moon. A tall man bore it. I didn't see
his face for the light blinded me. He opened the door and said
slowly, in my own language: "I see that the pious Hsi P'eng
persists in correcting my solitude. You no doubt wish to see the
garden?"

I recognized the name of one of our consuls and
I replied, disconcerted, "The garden?"

The damp path zigzagged like those of
my childhood. We came to a library of Eastern and Western books. I
recognized bound in yellow silk several volumes of the Lost
Encyclopedia, edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but
never printed. The record on the phonograph revolved next to a bronze
phoenix. I also recall a famille rose vase and another, many
centuries older, of that shade of blue which our craftsmen copied
from the potters of Persia . . .

Stephen Albert observed me
with a smile. He was, as I have said, very tall, sharp-featured, with
gray eyes and a gray beard. He told me that he had been a missionary
in Tientsin "before aspiring to become a Sinologist."

We
sat down-I on a long, low divan, he with his back to the window and a
tall circular clock. I calculated that my pur­suer, Richard
Madden, could not arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable
determination could wait.

"An astounding fate, that of
Ts'ui Pen," Stephen Albert said. "Governor of his native
province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and in the tireless
interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and
calligrapher-he abandoned all this in order to compose a book and a
maze. He renounced the pleasures of both tyranny and justice, of his
populous couch, of his banquets and even of erudition-all to close
himself up for thirteen years in the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude.
When he died, his heirs found nothing save chaotic manuscripts. His
family, as you may be aware, wished to condemn them to the fire; but
his executor-a Taoist or Buddhist monk-insisted on their
publica­tion."

"We descendants of Ts'ui Pen,"
I replied, "continue to curse that monk. Their publication was
senseless. The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts.
I examined it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth
he is alive. As for the other undertaking of Ts'ui Pen, his labyrinth
. . ."

"A
labyrinth of symbols," he corrected. "An invisible
labyrinth of time. To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted
the revelation of this diaphanous mystery. After more than a hun­dred
years, the details are irretrievable; but it is not hard to
conjecture what happened. Ts'ui Pen must have said once: I am
withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdraw­ing
to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did
it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. The
Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that
was perhaps intricate; that circum­stance could have suggested to
the heirs a physical labyrinth. Hs'ui Pen died; no one in the vast
territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of
the novel suggested to me that it was the maze. Two circumstances
gave me the correct solution of the problem. One: the curious legend
that Ts'ui Pen had planned to create a labyrinth which would be
strictly infinite. The other: a fragment of a letter I
discovered."

Albert rose. He turned his back on me for a
moment; he opened a drawer of the black and gold desk. He faced me
and in his hands he held a sheet of paper that had once been crimson,
but was now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned. The fame of Ts'ui
Pen as a calligrapher had been justly won. I read, uncompre­hendingly
and with fervor, these words written with a minute brush by a man of
my blood: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of
forking paths. Wordlessly, I returned the sheet. Albert
continued:

"Before unearthing this letter, I had
questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I
could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A
book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had
the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered too that
night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when
Schehera­zade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins
to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights,
establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must
repeat it, and thus on to infinity. I imagined as well a Platonic,
hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new
individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of
his elders. These conjectures diverted me; but none seemed to
correspond, not even remotely, to the contradictory chapters of Ts'ui
Pen. In the midst of this perplexity, I received from Oxford the
manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the sentence:
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden o f forking
paths. Almost instantly, I understood: `the garden of forking paths'
was the chaotic novel; the phrase `the various futures (not to all)'
suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading
of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a
man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and
eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses
simultaneously-all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures,
diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then,
is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say,
has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill
him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill
the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they
both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pen, all possible
outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other
forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for
example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts
you are my enemy, in another, my friend. If you will resign yourself
to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."

His
face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably
that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even
immortal. He read with slow precision two versions of the same epic
chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely
mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men
undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second,
the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking
place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the
celebration and they win the victory. I listened with proper
veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in
themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and
were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course
of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle. I remember the last
words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus
fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their
swords, resigned to kill and to die.

From that moment on, I
felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible
swarming. Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and finally
coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation
that they in some manner prefigured. Stephen Albert continued:

"I
don't believe that your illustrious ancestor played idly with these
variations. I don't consider it credible that he would sacrifice
thirteen years to the infinite execution of a rhetorical experiment.
In your country, the novel is a subsidiary form of literature; in
Ts'ui Pen's time it was a despicable form. Ts'ui Pen was a brilliant
novelist, but he was also a man of letters who doubtless did not
consider himself a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries
proclaims-and his life fully confirms-his metaphysical and mystical
interests. Philosophic controversy usurps a good part of the novel. I
know that of all problems, none disturbed him so greatly nor worked
upon him so much as the abysmal problem of time. Now then, the latter
is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of the Garden.
He does not even use the word that signifies time. How do you explain
this voluntary omission?"

I proposed several
solutions-all unsatisfactory. We discussed them. Finally, Stephen
Albert said to me:

"In a riddle whose answer is chess,
what is the only prohibited word?"

I thought a moment and
replied, "The word chess." "Precisely," said
Albert. "The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or
parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its
mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and
obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing
it. That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings
of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts'ui Pen. I have compared
hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors that the
negligence of the copyists has introduced, I have guessed the plan of
this chaos, I have re-established -- I believe I have
re-established-the primordial organization, I have translated the
entire work: it is clear to me that not once does he employ the word
`time.' The explanation is obvious: The Garden of Forking Paths is an
incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pen
conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor
did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an
infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent,
convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached
one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for
centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the
majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I,
and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a
favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in
another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still
another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."

"In
every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, "I
am grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden
of Ts'ui Pen."

"Not in all," he murmured with a
smile. "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In
one of them I am your enemy."

Once again I felt the
swarming sensation of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the
humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with
invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and
multiform in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the
tenuous nightmare dissolved. In the yellow and black garden there was
only one man; but this man was as strong as a statue . . . this man
was approaching along the path and he was Captain Richard
Madden.

"The future already exists," I replied, "but
I am your friend. Could I see the letter again?"

Albert
rose. Standing tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; for the
moment his back was to me. I had readied the revolver. I fired with
extreme caution. Albert fell uncomplainingly, immediately. I swear
his death was instantaneous--a lightning stroke.

The rest is
unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me. I have been
condemned to the gallows. I have won out abominably; I have
communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must attack.
They bombed it yesterday; I read it in the same papers that offered
to England the mystery of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert who
was murdered by a stranger, one Yu Tsun. The Chief had deciphered
this mystery. He knew my problem was to indicate (through the uproar
of the war) the city called Albert, and that I had found no other
means to do so than to kill a man of that name. He does not know (no
one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness.

Footnote

[1]
An hypothesis both hateful and odd: The Prussian spy Hans Rabener,
alias Viktor Runeberg, attacked with drawn automatic the bearer of
the warrant for his arrest, Captain Richard Madden. The latter, in
self-defense, inflicted the wound which brought about Runeberg's
death. (Editor's note.)